Chile just got really good at creating drinking water from fog

A fog-harvesting system that is up to five times more efficient than previous systems at turning airborne water into drinking water has been developed by researchers at MIT in collaboration with colleagues in Chile. Fog harvesting is not a new technique — it’s already used to pull drinking water out of the air in at least 17 different countries. Systems generally consist of some sort of vertical mesh, a little like a large tennis net. The technique is inspired by specialized plants and insects that survive in some of the world’s driest regions by drawing water from the air in this way. The research team has managed to optimize the nets by fine-tuning the size of the filaments in the nets, the size of the holes between the filaments, and the coating applied to the filaments.